Amid Trump’s rise, Long Islanders fear a return to violence against immigrants

LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK — Eight years ago this November, a gang of white teenagers in Patchogue, New York who called themselves the “Caucasian Crew” stabbed Marcelo Lucero to death as the 37-year-old Ecuadorean immigrant walked home from work. The hate crime marked the lowest point in decades of anti-immigrant violence and harassment that festered on Long Island, and it spurred the community into action. Since Lucero’s death, local leaders have worked tirelessly to educate the community, reform and diversify the local police force, and make Suffolk County more welcoming to immigrants and refugees.

All that changed this year when Donald Trump rose to prominence on the political landscape. Immigrants and local leaders on Long Island told ThinkProgress that they see a rise in anti-immigrant anger spurred by Trump’s proposals for mass deportations and a border wall, and speeches demonizing immigrants. They worry violence could follow.

“We’re afraid of going back to those dark days” that lead up to Lucero’s killing, said Maryann Slutsky, Executive Director of the immigration-focused organization Long Island WINS. “We’ve made so much progress and now we’re going to go right back to where we started from.”

A fertile ground for violence

Long before Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign with a notorious speech calling Latin American immigrants criminals, drug dealers, and rapists, Long Island had developed its own reputation for anti-immigrant hostility.

“Latino immigrants in Suffolk County are regularly harassed, taunted, and pelted with objects hurled from cars,” a Southern Poverty Law Center report found in 2009. “They are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles, and many report being beaten with baseball bats and other objects. Others have been shot with BB guns or pepper-sprayed. Most will not walk alone after dark; parents often refuse to let their children play outside. A few have been the targets of arson attacks and worse.”

The SPLC and residents who spoke to ThinkProgress about the tensions that preceded Lucero’s death placed some of the blame for this environment on local politicians, who over the past few decades have attempted to pass immigrant-targeting legislation and openly called for violence.

At a public hearing in 2001, County Legislator Michael D’Andre of Smithtown said that if the number of Latino day laborers increased in his community, “We’ll be out with baseball bats.”

In 2007, County Legislator Elie Mystal of Amityville said of Latino day laborers, “If I’m living in a neighborhood and people are gathering like that, I would load my gun and start shooting, period.”

In 2009, Long Island’s Oyster Bay passed a law criminalizing day laborers. “Their need to be employed doesn’t mean they can cause chaos on our streets,” said Town Supervisor John Venditto. A federal court struck down the law as unconstitutional last year.

In 2015, Riverhead town Councilwoman Jodi Giglio pushed for a policy to profile, fingerprint, and detain suspected undocumented immigrants, saying: “We can’t just keep releasing criminals out onto the street. This could be our next Freedom Tower attack.”

In 2006, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy spoke of women crossing the border to give birth to “anchor babies… free of charge.” He unsuccessfully pushed for a law that would have empowered county police officers to detain Latinos solely on suspicion of being undocumented and turn them over to federal authorities for deportation. In 2008, he dismissed Marcelo Lucero’s murder as a “one-day story.”

Joselo Lucero, Marcelo’s younger brother, told ThinkProgress he believes Levy is partly responsible for stirring up the hatred that led to his brother’s death, and he fears Donald Trump could have a similar impact with his own anti-immigrant message.

“Levy had so much influence in the local media, which gave him the space to talk about implementing all these rules against immigrants,” he said. “If a local politician in one small town can lead to the murder of my brother, imagine what someone at a high level could do.”

When contacted by ThinkProgress, Levy pushed back hard against this characterization. “How can anyone say that the teenage thugs, who never even knew my name or anything about county government, were somehow taking their cues from those in leadership positions?” he said. “These were simply thugs who committed outrageous crimes and were punished accordingly.”

Levy claimed that until Marcelo Lucero’s murder, “not a single elected official”— himself included— was aware of “heinous activity” being perpetrated against immigrants in the area. He took umbrage at being “excoriated” by “extremists” for pursuing strict immigration enforcement policies.

“Our emergency rooms were being flooded,” he said. “There were tremendous costs having to be borne by taxpayers to deal with the influx of illegal immigrants into our school system. There was a great deal of housing overcrowding, and in some cases, up to 200 laborers congregating at 7-Elevens or on busy street corners, creating very difficult traffic situations.”

While Central Americans have been migrating to Long Island for several decades and have been a part of the community for multiple generations, a recent influx of refugees from the region exacerbated existing anti-immigrant sentiment. As tens of thousands of children from Central America have entered the United States over the past couple years — many of them fleeing brutal gang violence in their home countries — Suffolk County became one of the top receiving communities in the nation. Hundreds of kids have been released to relatives already living on Long Island while they await their day in court.

Many community members have been vocally opposed to taking these children in. At a community forum earlier this year, residents suggested the children could carry Ebola or other diseases, be members of gangs, or bring drugs into the country.

“You have where immigrants live, and you have where non-immigrants live, and never the twain shall meet.”

“These little kids risked their lives to come here because life was so impossible and horrific and violent in their home countries,” said Slutsky. “They were just coming to be with their parents. But people here were demonizing them and saying the stupidest things, like that they would bring their property values down.”

Another factor fueling a fear of immigrants, said local immigration attorney Elise Damas, is Long Island’s extreme economic and racial segregation. “You have very few communities where there is intermixing,” she said. “You have where immigrants live, and you have where non-immigrants live, and never the twain shall meet. The extent of interaction with immigrants for most Long Islanders is the guy who mows their lawn.”

Damas, who works with the Central American human rights group CARECEN, is among the advocates who say those who do not personally know immigrants are more susceptible to negative rhetoric about them from local officials and from Donald Trump.

“When he says these awful things, it makes an impression on people who don’t know any differently,” Slutsky said. “So I don’t fault people who don’t know. If I didn’t do this work all day, I wouldn’t know that immigrants pay taxes and sustain the community economically. But because many people don’t know, his words really matter.”

Reckoning

Marcelo Lucero’s death was a reckoning for Long Island.

As the teens who murdered him stood trial, an investigation by the Justice Department found widespread discrimination against Latinos by the Suffolk County Police Department, which regularly failed to investigate hate crimes and discouraged Latino residents from reporting those crimes in the first place. The DOJ ordered a series of reforms, including the hiring of bilingual officers, better training, and the reprimand of officers who discriminated. A report last year found that the department is complying with some, but not all, of these reforms.

As civil rights groups pushed for the police department to fully implement the federally mandated changes and improve relations with the immigrant community, people directly impacted by the violent climate, including Joselo Lucero, began to speak out. He joined the Hagedorn Foundation, a Long Island-based nonprofit that works with groups on social justice issues. He regularly visits local universities, high schools, and teachers’ conferences to talk about bullying, discrimination, and hate crimes, and he also appears on local radio shows and writes op-eds for local newspapers to promote his message of tolerance and understanding.

“If we don’t constantly remind people what happened, they’re going to forget, and things will go back to the way they were before,” he warned.

The Hagedorn Foundation also began taking community members on annual delegations to Mexico to help them understand the economic, political, and social factors that force so many people to migrate to the United States in the first place.

Drama teacher Ruthie Pincus, who teaches at a high school just a few minutes away from where Marcelo Lucero died, went on one of these delegations this summer.

“I really did not know much about immigration or what has been going on Mexico,” she said. “The trip made me very sensitive to the idea that people may not necessarily choose to leave their families behind and make such a difficult journey. They sometimes have no choice. I also had to look at my own privilege and understand that not everyone has what we have.”

“People may not necessarily choose to leave their families behind and make such a difficult journey. They sometimes have no choice.”

Pincus says she now shares what she has learned with her students at Hauppauge High School “almost every day,” and says they “are opening their ears and eyes and beginning to understand.”

With changes taking shape on both the institutional and community levels, residents began to hope that Long Island could become a place that welcomed immigrants rather than feared them. But they say the atmosphere took a sharp turn this year, when Donald Trump launched his bid for the White House on a platform of banning some immigrants and deporting millions of others.

“This election is creating a culture that’s terrifying,” Pincus said. “But it gives me all that more drive to speak about what I’ve seen and about the humanity of immigrants.”

Suffolk County gets trumped

This April, Donald Trump held a rally just a few blocks from the site where Marcelo Lucero was killed. As the hotel mogul and GOP nominee read a poem comparing immigrants to dangerous serpents, physical fights broke out inside, and two attendees were arrested. A few weeks later, members of the community woke up to find recruitment flyers from the Ku Klux Klan scattered on the streets. The materials declared “White Lives Do Matter” and warned of a “cultural genocide” if immigration is allowed to continue.

The notorious white supremacist group has leafleted on Long Island several times over the past few years, predating Trump’s White House bid. But Joselo Lucero sees a connection between Trump’s rhetoric and a revival of overt racism in the community.

“When you have somebody running for the presidency using this type of language, it can influence people to be more against minorities and immigrants,” he told ThinkProgress.

Patchogue Mayor Paul Pontieri agrees. After learning of the KKK fliers, he told a local newspaper that “the rhetoric we hear continually from our almost-elected officials, whether it’s building walls or banning Muslims, it really gives people cover to do these kinds of things.”

Other Long Islanders report troubling signs of Trump’s influence in the area.

“There has been some deterioration this year,” said Pat Young, a professor at Long Island’s Hofstra University. “I see Latinos walking along and people scream at them, ‘Build the wall!’ It’s said to intimidate them.” Young said the slogan about a U.S.-Mexico border wall — a central theme of Trump’s campaign — has “become shorthand for ‘We don’t like Latinos.’”

Salvadoran immigrant Yancy Rivera, who has lived in the town of Hicksville on Long Island for 13 years, says she began seeing homemade signs with anti-immigrant messages after Trump’s campaign stop this spring.

“People started putting up signs on their lawns that basically said, ‘Latinos shouldn’t be in this country. They should get out,’” she said. “That didn’t feel good at all. I have family here. I can’t bring my children back to a country they don’t know.”

“He says openly on TV that immigrants are bad, and people follow whatever he says.”

Even local Republicans attribute some of the anti-immigrant fervor to the GOP nominee. Henry Salgado, who works on community relations for the Nassau County GOP, says that kind of rhetoric can be influential.

“He says openly on TV that immigrants are bad, and people follow whatever he says,” Salgado noted. “He’s spreading very bad rumors against immigrants, and there are people out there who are prejudiced who are listening.”

People on Long Island are certainly listening. In the primary election this spring, Trump won more votes in Suffolk County than anywhere else in New York. Far more Republican primary votes were cast in the county than Democratic votes, despite the fact that the county has backed a Democrat for president in every election since 1992.

Other parts of the United States have already seen Trump supporters physically attacking immigrants or those perceived to be immigrants. Long Islanders fear their community, with its fraught history, could be next.

“If you’re an average citizen and you’re looking at somebody constantly saying, ‘We’re being invaded. These people are coming and taking over,’ it creates a mentality where people say, ‘We have to do something about this,’” Joselo Lucero said. “Crimes against immigrants could happen at any time. I hope it’s not going to escalate.”

Long Islanders push back

When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off on the debate stage at Long Island’s Hofstra University in early October, hundreds of students and community members flooded the campus to wave signs, shout slogans, and denounce Trump’s rhetoric on crime, race, and immigration. Among them was sophomore Sharon Rus, who held aloft a neon sign reading “NO WALL.”

“Everyone should be able to be a part of America, not just people who look a certain way or have a certain skin color,” said Rus, a member of the Hofstra Feminist Collective. “We don’t want to be separationist, like some candidates. I want to show that Hofstra is about love and peace and not intolerance.”